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Five advantages of follow the sun-routing

If your company has several contact centers around the world, you’ve probably come across Time of day-routing. This type of routing allows you to automatically forward incoming calls to active call centers based on the time of day defined in a calendar. If you have contact centers active in different time zones across the world, you could take this up a notch and implement Follow the sun-routing.

International teams in different time zones

Providing customer service by following the sun, allows you to service customers in a continuous support model for 24 hours. Ideally, you will have international teams in different locations and time zones who together cover all 24 hours of the day. Incoming calls are routed to the active contact centers, based on a time-of-day routing combined with for example a weighted, language-based or skill-based distribution of calls. If you have the right tools at hand (such as our online portal Gearbox), you can manage these routings yourself and even adapt them on the fly if necessary.

Overlapping shifts

At some point during shifts, several locations will be working alongside to answer calls. So, no matter what time and from which location a customer calls, there is always an active call center. Also, tickets that can’t be solved right away and need further investigating can be picked up or investigated further around the clock and won’t have to wait until the next day. Provided of course that all contact centers use the same contact center CRM software.

Advantages

So what are the most important benefits that an effective Follow the sun-routing can provide:

No need to plan (more expensive) nightshifts: 24/7 coverage can easily be achieved by adding up the working hours of teams in different time zones

Vastly reduce delays in replying: when one location closes, one or more other locations are still active and can pick up remaining open tickets

Easier to handle (un)expected peaks: if one contact center unexpectedly receives more calls than they can handle, the overload can easily be routed to other active locations.

Calls can be routed to a location in a different time zone that is not affected in case of national holidays or outages

Increased customer satisfaction because of 24/7 availability and quicker replies to issues that need further investigation